Further spiraling down the rabbit hole into uselessness (following their recent FUBARs in changes to donation levels and generally crappy customer service), Humble Bundle offered up this gem:
Humble Book Bundle: Bikes by Microcosm
Now, if one were to judge a bundle by its title, one might assume that this is a batch of small-press books on bicycles and the cycling lifestyle.
Not a chance in hell. It features such wonderful titles as:
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Bikes in Space: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction
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Taking The Lane - a series of Feminist and Trans 'zines about dealing with misogyny and the like in bicycling culture in Portland
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Bikes Not Rockets: Intersectional Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories
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Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers
I couldn't make these up if I tried. Out of the whole bundle it looks like there are maybe three or four books that might have something real to read about cycling culture. The rest are in the same vein as the above-listed feminist and trans rhetoric.
I have but one thing to say: We needed this bundle like a fish needs a bicycle.
Outside of the mountain and bmx community, the entire bike “scene” is toxic as hell.
I don’t know what it is about pavement, but those who ride on it lose their god damn minds and begin to turn batshit crazy. If you get a few of them together, they become an impotent little horde with a serious attitude problem toward the world around them.
I’ve never understood why they bike bc they clearly hate everyone around them and they bitch and moan non-stop.
If they have their own bike lane, they freak out that cars are on the streets.
If they have their own paved trail, they freak out about walkers on the trail.
And when they finally have their own bikes only fuckin special lane, they then freak out about OTHER BIKERS on there.
They are 100% toxic people who can never be happy. They are mentally broken.
A lot of those people are crazy as hell. I can get why SOME of them are the way they are. It only takes getting hit by a car once before you get very hyperaware of where everyone else is on the road.
My family and I ride ebikes around town, and it always amazes me how unfriendly those people can be.
Yes, it's one of the main problems is that city planners - total retards that they seem to be - never really accounted for bikes as VEHICLES in their OWN CLASS. Bikes have been considered, in North America, little more than toys, or leisure equipment. Which is why bike trails go nowhere and tend to wind through nowhere anyone really wants to be or needs to go (ie, useless for running errands) and you're forced to share with either cars or pedestrians - and they ask the BIKER to choose. You CAN'T, they won't LET you.
The city I'm in is fucking terrible for both pedestrians and bike riders; it's like it was designed by a total car-worshiper on Hire a Retard day.